Update: The Kickstarter has been fully funded in less than 11 hours! Excitement!
Here's a Kickstarter I've been waiting for for quite some time. I've been a fan of Sup, Holmes? for probably about two years, and it's a shame how few people I know listen to it. Sup, Holmes? is a weekly 90-minute talk show with the people who make the video games you love. From artists to programmers to designers to PR, everyone in the game industry gets an hour and a half of down to earth talking - something I think the industry desperately needs.
The most valuable lesson I've gotten from this show is that anyone is capable of making games. When we see people like Cliff Bleszinski, Notch, and John Carmack, it's kind of hard to imagine ourselves in their shoes. However, once you get a developer like that on Sup, Holmes?, it's easy to see them as regular people who just happen to do awesome things. Jonathan Blow was on the show way back at episode 22, and it's still one of my favorite episodes to go back to. While I love listening to him give highly intelligent, structured talks, there's something different about seeing him talk with Jonathan Holmes one-on-one. I could pick dozens of episodes for the same reason - to young people interested in games, the best motivator is to show them that their dreams are attainable. Want to be a pixel artist? You can listen to Paul Veer talk about his experiences being one. Maybe you're interested in making games, but don't have a clue what role you could fill in a dev team. If that's the case, maybe there's a guest out there who does a job you didn't even know existed.
The best part about this? Almost all of these developers are on Twitter, or have their work immediately viewable online. My favorite part of every episode is when I get a developer's Twitter handle and get to see exactly the work they do while they're talking about it. To use Paul Veer as an example again, I can see the games he's contributed work for, such as Luftrausers and Nuclear Throne. I can also see the kind of work he posts to his Tumblr and get an idea of who he is creatively, as well as what he likes to talk about/do in his free time.
Maybe this is of little value to some people out there, but to me, this show is one of the most important things online. It showed me two years ago that making games and writing about them was something I could do - not just the people I looked up to. The show puts an emphasis on these creators as people, unique people who use the medium of games to do amazing things. The best part about it is that it encourages everyone else to join in and do the same.
